One of the designers of Magic the card game recently got married. He blogs about it in awesome detail. Wouldn’t you know that he and his bride decided to have a super detailed themed wedding. Their theme? Games and puzzles. Whether their theme resonates with you or not you can’t help but love the amount of effort they put into the details. Here’s their invitation:

They also spent quite a bit of time on the cake which was designed to look like the game of Life with details from their lives embedded throughout the board:

“I’m not sure how easy you can tell, but every detail of the board was copied onto the cake, right down to the words on each square. Except the words on the board weren’t the actual text of the game. Oh no. If we were going to personalize everything else, why stop at the cake. So I rewrote every square of the game talking about things that could happen to Lora and me in our future. The Game of Life, by the way, has a lot of squares. And Mike’s Amazing Cakes, bless them, put every word I wrote on the cake. Lora stressed that I didn’t need to go through the trouble. Who was going to bother to read the entire cake?”

I think this serves as a good model for any experience you create, wedding, software, or otherwise. People appreciate effort. Even on tiny tiny details. In these difficult economic times cutbacks will be inevitable. But the companies that still have the discipline and focus to get the details right will end up retaining loyal customers, while others will only cheapen their brand and harm their customers’ experience.

[thx Steve for the heads up]